Michael Winship: Washington today: Cash you can believe in

Friday

Oct 22, 2010 at 12:01 AMOct 22, 2010 at 10:13 PM

Campaign finance reform has been a goal of the organization Common Cause since it was founded in 1970 by the great John Gardner, a Republican.

“Somebody once said the Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.” So John F. Kennedy famously remarked in 1961, and so the town seemed to remain when I first moved there in 1969 to go to school.

There were still “temporary” buildings on the National Mall that had been there since the end of World War I, filled with government workers. But any citizen could freely walk the corridors of Congress, enter a member’s office to leave an opinion, pick up a pass for the visitors’ galleries of the House or Senate, or ride that little subway that runs underneath the Capitol. No campaign contributions required.

Or so it seemed to a white, middle-class college kid. Washington also was a city in decline. Not quite a year and a half had passed since the three days of riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Thirteen people had died, more than a thousand were hurt, and you could still see piles of rubble and burned-out storefronts.

Robert Reich — the new chairman of the non-partisan, citizens’ lobby Common Cause — remembers D.C. in those days, too. He interned for Bobby Kennedy and later at the Federal Trade Commission. But by the time Reich became President Clinton’s secretary of Labor in 1993, “Washington was much fancier,” he recalled. “It almost glittered — the hotels and the bistros and the restaurants — and the money.”

Speaking at Common Cause’s 40th anniversary dinner this month, Reich noted, “It’s even wealthier today. You walk around Washington and you see what it is and that money is here for one reason … and that is to influence our democracy. ... This election that is coming up is an election in which for the first time that I can remember there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to candidates and we have no way of knowing who is providing this money at all. Complete, absolute secrecy.”

The website Politico.com echoes Reich: “By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can’t be traced back to its original source, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-profit group Democracy 21. ‘And this is just the beginning,’ Wertheimer said. ‘Unless we get some changes here to mitigate this problem, I would expect we will see $500 million or more in 2012.’”

This is not just the fault of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, although it has unleashed vast new sums of cash into the system — compare this year’s elections with the midterms of four years ago.

But the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act has been eviscerated by the courts, and what’s left of it is barely enforced by the Federal Election Commission. The same goes for various provisions of the federal tax code, which need not only stricter enforcement but beefing up.

Unfortunately, while the voting public expresses concern over campaign spending, it’s not very high on their agenda; most believe it will take an outrage such as Watergate, or at least another Jack Abramoff influence peddling-type scandal to get reform back on the tracks.

Campaign finance reform has been a goal of the organization Common Cause since it was founded in 1970 by the great John Gardner, a Republican. My colleague Bill Moyers ended their anniversary dinner last week with a call to action, invoking the memory of Gardner and another prominent member of the GOP.

“The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy,” Moyers said. “Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the ‘naked robbery’ of the public’s trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: ‘It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft … not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.’”

Moyers concluded, “The only way to defeat organized money is with organized people. Now it's your turn.”

Michael Winship is senior writer at Public Affairs Television in New York City.

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